One of the feistiest Wall Street start-ups to take on Bloomberg LP is striking right at the heart of its main competitor — by hiring one of Bloomberg’s former top executives.

Norman Pearlstine, the former chief content officer at Bloomberg, has joined Money.net, a financial data company that was founded by Morgan Downey, another alum of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s company.

Pearlstine, who became Time Inc.’s Vice Chairman this July after about three years as its CCO, will lead Money.net’s development of an artificial intelligence-based news service to directly take on one of Bloomberg’s biggest money makers, its ultra-fast First Word service.

“That’s to me the top priority — once you’ve told people what happened, if you can rather quickly tell them what it means, that’s probably the greatest utility you can provide,” Pearlstine told The Post.

The company is still developing the AI news service, which Downey said requires huge amounts of historical data, and human input.

“It’s like training a two-year-old,” Downey said. “You can’t just let it go by itself.”

Money.net is planning to hire 75 developers and 25 journalists to get the product up and running by early next year, Downey said.

Pearlstine, who started Monday, joined the company as new, bare-bones news services are popping up to compete against Bloomberg’s First Word. Earlier this year, Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei hired First Word veteran Nick Johnston as the editor in chief of a fledgling news service that’s said to focus on business news.

“The first thing I want to do is start spending some time with customers, understanding their information needs, and see how they’re using Money.net now,” he said.

The two executives met when they both worked at Bloomberg headquarters on the Upper East Side.

“We both sat beside each other,” Downey said. “We both talked about the news and the business of news.”